How many Indigenous people lived in Brazil in 1500?

Nobody counted

No one took a census in 1500. Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet, bound for India, spent ten days on one stretch of the coast of Bahia, in what is now northeastern Brazil, and sailed on. So every figure for that year is an estimate. In the work of the historian John Hemming and the anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, the estimates run from about 2 million to more than 5 million people in the territory of modern Brazil.

Why such a wide range? Because the count is made backward. Historians start from Jesuit letters and chroniclers’ accounts, which describe villages and tally the dead, and from how many people each region could feed. But those papers were written decades after first contact, when epidemics were already spreading. The more people you assume had died before anyone wrote, the higher the total. Some estimates run higher still. What holds is the order of magnitude: millions, not thousands.

Hundreds of peoples

This was not one nation. It was hundreds of peoples speaking hundreds of languages. Along the coast lived mostly Tupi-speaking peoples: the Potiguara, Caeté, Tupinambá and Tupiniquim. Inland and in the Amazon lived peoples of other language families, such as Macro-Jê, Arawak and Carib.

The twenty or so men with bows who waited for Nicolau Coelho’s boat at a river mouth on April 23, 1500, were Tupiniquim. They lived in villages of great communal houses, and Portuguese visitors reported thirty or forty people sleeping in a single house. Their Tupinambá neighbors wore red cloaks of scarlet ibis feathers.

What Caminha missed

They neither till nor breed. Nor is there here ox, nor cow, nor goat, nor sheep, nor hen, nor any other beast that is used to living with men.

The fleet’s scribe got this wrong, and the mistake matters for the numbers. The Tupi kept no cattle, but they certainly farmed. They cleared gardens in the forest and planted manioc (cassava), maize, sweet potatoes and squash. The “yam” the Portuguese tasted was most likely manioc, the root behind the flour and the tapioca Brazilians still eat. Gardens, fishing and hunting fed large villages. The old myth of a land “practically empty” does not survive even Caminha’s own letter.

After contact, and today

Contact began with trade: iron axes and knives were worth a great deal to people who felled trees with stone axes. Then came war, the enslavement of Indigenous people to work the fields, and European diseases such as smallpox and measles, against which no one had immunity. In Bahia, the smallpox epidemic of 1562 and 1563 killed about a third of the people in three Jesuit villages, the Jesuit Leonardo do Vale estimated in a letter of May 12, 1563. José de Anchieta wrote that people spoke of 30,000 dead in two or three months.

Indigenous Brazilians did not vanish. Brazil’s 2022 census counted 1.69 million Indigenous people, belonging to 391 peoples and speaking 295 languages. Near Porto Seguro and Monte Pascoal, where the Tupiniquim met the fleet, the Pataxó live today. Who reached that coast first is in Who discovered Brazil?, and what the scribe wrote about the people he met is in What was the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha?.